The "cyborg" plants were created using nanotubes.
(Photo : Bryce Vickmark/ MIT) Cyborg plants have taken over a laboratory in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Thankfully, the nanotube equipped plants are not hostile and the scientists who made them simply gifted the plants with a turbocharged capacity for photosynthesis. While the new development sounds like something pulled straight out of a science fiction novel, the practical applications of these "bionic plants" are both numerous and infinitely useful for humanity.
Cyborg Plant. Born out my thesis, Flora Machina, the cyborg plant is the physical manifestation of theories and ideas that examine a landscape connected intimately with sensory technology.

The cyborg plant is a living Jade Plant inserted into a clear enclosure that houses several sensors, a processor and speakers. Once connected to a computer, the sensors feed information from the plant and the environment and are transcribed into an audio expression.
Cyborg Baby Spinach Could One Day Detect Chemical Weapons. "I like to think/(right now, please!)

/of a cybernetic forest/filled with pines and electronics/ where deer stroll peacefully/past computers/as if they were flowers/with spinning blossoms," poet Richard Brautigan wrote in 1967. His heavily optimistic (or heavily satirical) take on cyborg plants was prescient. Now, half a century later, researchers are working on giving baby spinach bomb-detecting capabilities.

That’s right. Cyborg baby spinach. Researchers showed that the carbon nanotubes—tiny cylinders of carbon a thousand times thinner than a human hair—could slip into the chloroplasts without damaging them, and then actually give the chloroplasts a 30% boost in their ability to capture solar energy.
Cyborg houseplants can wave back at you. Mad scientists at Keio University's Inami Lab in Yokohama, Japan, are set to unleash cyborg houseplants on the world.

Shown off at the recent Interaction 2012 in Tokyo, the "interactive plants" can move their branches in response to people moving around them. As seen in the video below, they've been rigged with motion sensors, microphones, actuators, and wires, which make their leaves sway when someone approaches. The mechanism is hardly visible, making it seem like the plants are trying to give you a high-five out of their own free will. The researchers have also defined sets of motions as various emotions supposedly expressed by the plants, such as anger.
Gilbert Esparza's Cyborg Plant. Give your plant a voice with the PlantLink Sensor. Plantoid : des robots inspirés des plantes. ARBRE.

Tableau : Automatic House Plant Watering Tray by Pikaplant. The Internet of Vegetables: How Cyborg Plants Can Monitor Our World. In the not too distant future, we could see cyborg plants that tell us when they need more water, what chemicals they’ve been exposed to, and what parasites are eating their roots.

These part-organic, part-electronic creations may even tell us how much pollution is in the air. And yes, they’ll plug into the network. That’s right: We’re on our way to the Internet of Plants. That’s the message from Andrea Vitaletti, the head of a blue-sky research group working on this very thing at a lab in Italy. The project is called PLEASED, short for “PLants Employed As SEnsing Devices.”

“Plants have millions of years of evolution. ‘Plants have millions of years of evolution. .
— Andrea Vitaletti His interest in combining plants and electronics dates to childhood, when he and his father used schematics found in an electronics magazine to build a simple circuit for generating sound from plants. Yes, we already have a wide variety of sensors for detecting temperature, humidity and the like.
Pleased Vision.